GOP Tax Scam Helps the 1% Build a Private Infrastructure for the Wealthy

The New York Times has an investigative report out this weekend on how the creation of “opportunity zones” created under the 2017 tax bill has been working out.  Ostensibly intended to direct investment at impoverished areas, the whole idea has largely turned into a scam by which the rich get richer, and everyone else gets left further behind.

The basic idea is that in exchange for investing in an opportunity zone certified by the U.S. Treasury — there are around 8,800 — wealthy investors would be able to defer or even eliminate paying capital gains taxes on previous investments, and also possibly avoid paying taxes related to these new projects. The zones are supposed to be areas below the median household income that would particularly benefit from an influx of investment money; but while “[n]early a third of the 31 million people who live in the zones are considered poor — almost double the national poverty rate [. . .] there are plenty of affluent areas inside those poor census tracts. And, as investors would soon realize, some of the zones were not low income at all.”

Rather than creating a flood of investment to neighborhoods that desperately need it, wealthy individuals and companies have zeroed in on those “affluent areas” included in the opportunity zones.  There is opportunity, all right — to make a killing for the rich, by building out real estate for the rich. And so “billions of untaxed investment profits are beginning to pour into high-end apartment buildings and hotels, storage facilities that employ only a handful of workers, and student housing in bustling college towns, among other projects.”  Adding to the portrait of one-percenter corruption, the president’s own businesses, family, and cronies are seeking to take advantage of this tax provision.  It’s almost as if they wrote the laws to. . . benefit themselves?

It was bad enough that the Trump administration’s biggest idea for helping impoverished neighborhoods was a plan to enable the richest people in American to avoid paying taxes.  But even on those contemptible terms, the plan is turning out to be what critics said it would be: a way to make the rich richer at the expense of the rest of us.  Not only is the tax break component a way for rich people to pad their wealth by ensuring they don’t pay their fair share to the Treasury, these investments are literally helping build a physical infrastructure for the wealthiest Americans to live apart from the rest of the U.S.  And the fancy hotels and condos are not only valuable commodities for the investors, but are valuable investments for their wealthy purchasers as well.

The Hot Screen got an early warning of this large-scale grotesquerie last month, when our hometown paper The Oregonian ran a story on an unprecedentedly upscale condo and hotel project to be constructed smack in the middle of Portland’s downtown.  It will be 35 stories tall (which would make it one of the highest in Portland), with 11 floors dedicated to a Ritz-Carlton hotel, and other floors occupied by condos branded by the hotel chain.  The guest rooms will cost $450 a night, about double the most expensive lodgings in the city at present.  Construction costs are estimated to be $600 million — but the whole plan is being enabled because the developer aims to get a whopping $150 million via opportunity zone investments. Another way of looking at it: investors will put $150 million into the project so as to avoid up to otherwise avoid paying $60 million in taxes (based on a 40% tax rate that could otherwise hit those capital gains), and on top of this will be able to reap gains from this new investment with significant additional tax benefits.

Even without the opportunity zone angle, this project would present as a grotesquerie on the Portland cityscape.  Beyond the moral outrage of the city not being able to find shelter for thousands of homeless people, Portland has experienced a more general crisis of affordability for years now, as rapidly escalating rents make less and less of the city affordable for working- and even middle-class individuals and families.  Developers already routinely walk away from obligations to provide lower-income housing, despite having received municipal tax breaks based on promises to do so (afraid of picking fights with developers, the City lets them get away with it).

So it’s a bit of a trip to bizarro world to see a tax provision officially meant to encourage investment in low-income neighborhoods being used instead to supercharge processes that reach beyond simple gentrification, toward something sublimely terrible: the ability of wealthy developers to avoid paying taxes in order to build real estate properties that are so stratospherically beyond the price range of people already barely able or unable to afford to live in Portland, when that very same tax provision was promoted as benefiting ordinary Americans.  And so our city will be graced with a federally-subsidized hotel and condo complex that 99% of us can’t afford to live in or stay at.  Adding insult to injury, apart from the short-term construction jobs created, employment in the building will involve catering to the needs of filthy rich individuals; Ritz-Carlton’s motto is “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen,” but this Downton Abby-ish phrasing hides the fact that employment there inevitably involves people not being paid nearly enough to make real the fantasies of their social betters.  That it’s all to be done through the miracle of tax laws written by and for the rich should inspire not gratitude that a few jobs have been created, but outrage at the thought of all the better jobs and homes that could have been had through policies truly aimed at benefitting ordinary Americans.

This Portland project also carries a lesson about the larger corruption of Trumpism; it demonstrates how a racist and authoritarian-inclined president can gain and retain the loyalty of his fellow millionaires and billionaires, whose interests he sees best of all. And when a city government like Portland’s ignores the waste of tax dollars and the basic inequity in such a boondoggle, in the name of paltry job creation at the expense of further stratifying our city into haves and have-nots, it lends moral support to a regime overwhelmingly rejected by its own citizens, and tacitly endorses an economic model in which wealthiest accumulate more and more of the nation’s wealth.

Brain Drain

One classic way to view the Trump era is as a series of outrages followed by dashed hopes among opponents of the president that THIS OUTRAGE will finally turn the tide against him, and lead to his disgraceful downfall and exit from the political stage upon which he has strutted and shit for too long now.  I won’t pretend I haven’t been one of these frequently dashed hopers; it takes one to know one, as they say.  But as the outrages have come with increasing frequency — we could say without too much exaggeration that they are now more or less constant — the general feeling that either this one or the next would do in the president seems to have gradually faded.  In part, this hope has been beaten down by reality: get disappointed enough times, and you finally internalize the lesson.

But I’d also like to think it’s faded as a certain related belief has faded - that we can rely on either the GOP or Trump supporters to reach a breaking point at which they desert the president en masse.  It’s gradually dawned on Democrats and others that what count as catastrophes to us count as cool moves to many in the GOP and the president’s base, from his blaming of immigrants for the bulk of our economic challenges to putting a frat boy sexual assaulter on the Supreme Court. (The president’s survival should also have discredited the hope that a vaguely-defined notion of “decency” will somehow sway enough supporters of the president to move out of his camp.  Those who are moved by considerations of decency would never have supported the president in the first place.)

And yet: the discouragement we have felt so far, and the growing faith that Trump’s supporters and fellow GOP politicians will never abandon him, may have led us to be overly pessimistic about possible circumstances under which the Republican Party might actually turn on Trump. I am thinking about this today because I do think we are seeing a meltdown in this presidency that likely will accelerate in the coming months.  (I say “presidency” rather than “president” because it is not just that Trump himself has become more self-absorbed in his pronouncements, erratic in his behavior, and virulent in his hate in recent weeks, but to recognize that this behavior is accompanied by diminishing evidence that any of his advisors, or the greater bureaucracy of the executive branch, can act as a shield against his worst impulses.)  This particular meltdown comes in two forms: psychological, in terms of Trump’s mental health, and economic, in terms of Trump’s stewardship of the economy.

Over the past several weeks, the president seems to have been experiencing an accelerating mental health crisis, in which anger, delusions of grandeur, and panic at a potentially deteriorating economy seem to have pushed the man ever further into a downward spiral.  Need we really say more than the single word “Greenland”? And with his escalation of trade wars and the resulting harm to the U.S. economy, it seems well within the realm of possibility that he will steer the country into a recession.  Either factor — the president’s psychological collapse or the tanking of the American economy — could well be enough to stir Republicans into significant, if not mass opposition, to this presidency.  But in combination, we behold the spectacle of a president who is clearly flailing, flustered, and self-deluded in the face of his own bad economic decisions, unable to admit a mistake; this seriously undermines any claims to strong leadership, presenting instead the image (and reality) of an incompetent man endangering both the GOP’s future prospects and voters’ livelihoods.

The past several weeks have dramatically raised the possibility that the end may come more quickly than opponents of Trump have dared dream — not because of the Democrats’ opposition, which has been sadly far from implacable, but because Republican politicians fear both his clear mental instability and his failing political acumen, and because segments of his base wish to avoid the economic shitstorm he seems determined to unleash upon the nation, whether it’s country club Republicans who’ve had enough (as Matthew Yglesias speculates here) or blue collar women who are already beginning to turn on him and so destroy the “Red Wall” of his working-class base.  At some point, the Republicans may have an overwhelming interest in making Trump the solitary scapegoat of the economic poison he has forced the country to drink, as a way of preventing an electoral wipeout in 2020 and real economic harm: and it is not hard to see his mental unfitness as providing the rationale to remove him, either by invocation of the 25th amendment or forcing his resignation.

There is a right way and a wrong way for this presidency to end: the worst possible way would be for the Republicans to claim full credit for his removal, to propound a story that everything was going great until the president had a mental breakdown because of all the difficult Making America Great Again Work he was doing, a martyr to the “conservative” cause.  This isn’t to say this would be a great outcome for the GOP — many millions of Americans would see through their bullshit — but it would be far less than the apocalyptic reckoning the Republican Party deserves, and would raise serious doubts about the Democrats’ understanding that there is no way forward that doesn’t include discrediting the GOP wholesale.  First and foremost, saying the president is breaking down mentally threatens to excuse the very real autocratic, racist, and anti-semitic ideas he embraces and propagates.  This confusion of authoritarian intent and mental erraticism can be found in much commentary: as just one example out of many, here’s CNN’s Brian Stelter making the case for Trump’s increasing erratic behavior:

The list includes Trump making racist comments about Baltimore and Democratic lawmakers; repeating ridiculous claims about voter fraud; retweeting conspiracy theories; bragging about his visits to hospitals in Dayton and El Paso; and denying things everyone heard him say. At one point he called Meghan Markle nasty on tape, then claimed he never said it.

Yet it is also possible — indeed, it is correct — to read this list and see Trump simply doubling down on the white supremacist, anti-democratic attitudes that form the core of his political identity.  The president may or may not be personally deranged, but the fact of the matter is that his politics are unquestionably so.  From declaring Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to be “evil,” to telling Democratic congresswomen to go back their countries of origin, to telling American Jews that they are “disloyal” if they vote for Democrats, the president’s politics are beneath contempt, the stuff of dictators and the Ku Klux Klan.  In the face of this evidence, arguing that the president is unfit for office because of his mental incompetence suggests that we not take seriously his vile beliefs, as if they are simply the emanations of a befuddled mind. 

Unforgivably, this tack provides unwarranted cover to all those who support both his vile beliefs and his actual war on American democracy.  As dangerous as Donald Trump is, personally, to our country and to the world, any politics that purposely or incidentally detaches him from the larger right-wing movement centered on a Republican Party that both shares and has supplied him with so many of his noxious ideas, and that has supported him wholeheartedly through his descent into authoritarian, racist rule, is catastrophically misguided and short-sighted.  As Donald Trump founders, the only rational political approach is to ensure that he takes down as much of the Republican Party as possible; that we do not simply label him as unfit for office on grounds of mental incompetence, but that we label his ideas, and those of the equally noxious GOP, as having no place in American democracy.

Blaming Trump and GOP for Crisis Won't Absolve Democrats From Needing a Vision

Jeet Heer takes apart the folly of any opponents of Trump (he singles out comedian Bill Maher) hoping a recession will arrive in time to spoil the president’s chances of re-election.  Taking the long view, Heer argues that while a recession may well help kick Trump out of the White House, it will pour fuel on the fire of the reactionary politics that Trump has glommed on to:

While bad economic times, if they come, will help defeat Trump and the GOP in 2020, they’ll also sow the seeds for an even more reactionary politics in the future. If history is any guide, an economic slowdown will make the American people more racist and less open to progressive policies, a likelihood increased by the fact that the current Trumpian moment is already a product of the Great Recession of 2008, the scars of which are still felt by many ordinary people.

Indeed, the concept that Democrats need only bide their time until things naturally turn their way (embodied perhaps most catastrophically in the idea that demographic change would inevitably and automatically deliver a permanent majority to Democrats forever and ever, amen) should make tingle the political spider sense of even the most arachnophobic among us.  This attitude contains various poisonous assumptions: that substantive change to the U.S. economy and politics aren’t necessary; that the party need not fight for any particular ideas with any special effort, or take positions that might lose it some votes in the near term; that the Republican Party will sit back and not try to maintain power by hook or by crook.  Such a description may seem like a caricature, but these tendencies have been demonstrated again and again over the past few decades, from President Obama’s decision not to pursue a fundamental reformation of the economy (such as of the financial sector that played such a huge role in gutting the financial livelihood of millions of Americans) to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s assertion that the Democrats can stand back and let Donald Trump “self-impeach.”

Heer notes that, perhaps contrary to many Democrats’ beliefs, recessions generally make voters more resistant to change (the major exceptions being the Great Depression and possibly the Great Recession, though the progressive possibilities of the latter were largely left unexplored by the Democrats).  He observers that, “If there is an imminent recession, Democrats need to see it as not just an electoral opportunity but also as a political problem. How are they going to keep the public receptive to transformative policies, when recessions typically make voters more skittish and less generous?”  The solution, he suggests, is to go big:

The New Deal example shows that an economic downturn doesn’t have to mean a more reactionary politics. But to avoid a shift to the right, the Democrats have to be as bold as Roosevelt. If there is a recession they have to pin the blame squarely on Trump—and create a lasting narrative of how his xenophobia and reckless policies squandered Obama’s legacy. They have to offer a robust alternative to the status quo. And they have to uphold the values of pluralism even as nativist and racist voices grow louder.

What Heer describes is a sort of one-two punch approach that in fact contains multitudes in terms of how Democrats should think of politics and what forms of governance and legislation they should push.  The idea of blaming Trump for any recession, and putting together a (truthful) story of how his policies contributed to it, is essential.  This is something the Democrats failed to do to George Bush in the aftermath of the 2008 elections, in part because the Democrats themselves were implicated in so many of the bad laws and policies that enabled the financial meltdown.  This time around, they can’t make that mistake again.  But the story we tell about Trump must reach beyond the president and the economy, and include how the GOP as a whole has supported not only his bad economic ideas, but a whole raft of authoritarian and racist policies that have no place in America.  Just as the Democrats rightly court charges of incompetence when they fail to make the case that our economic straits are due not to impoverished immigrants but to nearly half a century of increasing corporate power at the expense of all workers, they also masochistically court electoral disaster by failing to hold the GOP accountable not only for Trump’s extremism, but for its own: the deadly fealty to keeping weapons of war on city streets, the unending effort to keep women and gays as second class citizens, the racism that may be better disguised than Donald Trump’s but is no less the expression of a deep-rooted white supremacism.  

While there have been many promising signs that the Democrats are increasingly aware they’ll need to address how the GOP has gamed the political system to maintain political advantage — whether through racist gerrymandering or abuse of the Senate filibuster — there seems to have been less attention paid to systematically making the case for why the GOP has been in the wrong on these and other issues.  A key reason is that telling a story about what the Republican Party has done to shift the country rightward over the last several decades also requires the Democrats to tell their own story: one that has included laudable advances, but more than that, countless desultory compromises and demoralizing defeats.  Unless they want to continue to be complicit in the steady drift rightward, this leaves the Democrats with no choice but to make the case for progressive ideas going forward; as Heer puts it, Democrats must “offer a robust alternative to the status quo.”  The steady advance of the GOP, and particularly the crisis of Trumpism, could only come about because of the vacuum the Democrats created through their reluctance to fight for the non-wealthy majority, including, crucially, the blue-collar white workers who swarmed to Trump like moths to a flame.

Swede and Sour

Sensitive readers may still be reeling from last year’s Hot Screen post excoriating Denmark for its harsh treatment and deranged rhetoric toward immigrants that it had only recently welcomed into the country.  It may or may not come as a relief, then, that today we will leave Denmark be, to stew chastened in its nativist juices, and turn our attention to its northern Nordic neighbor, Sweden, which has been pursuing its own version of the same racist story.

The New York Times has begun an investigative series called “The New Nativists,” which seeks to “examine the evolution of hard-line immigration politics,” and the first stop in its world tour is Sweden.  In the last election, the Sweden Democrats won 18% of the vote; with roots in a neo-Nazi party, and placing blame on immigrants for all of Sweden’s problems, the ascent of the Sweden Democrats should be shocking to anyone who’s grown accustomed to that country’s reputation as a tolerant social-welfare state.  But, as the Times story suggests, the social welfare state has turned out to be the way to amp up anti-immigrant resentment.  For the Sweden Democrats, 

[n]o longer was the issue framed in terms of keeping certain ethnic groups out, or deporting those already in. Rather it was about how unassimilated migrants were eviscerating not just the nation’s cultural identity but also the social-welfare heart of the Swedish state.

Under the grand, egalitarian idea of the “folkhemmet,” or people’s home, in which the country is a family and its citizens take care of one another, Swedes pay among the world’s highest effective tax rates, in return for benefits like child care, health care, free college education and assistance when they grow old.

The safety net has come under strain for a host of economic and demographic reasons, many of which predate the latest refugee flood. But in the Sweden Democrats’ telling, the blame lies squarely at the feet of the foreigners, many of whom lag far behind native Swedes in education and economic accomplishment. One party advertisement depicted a white woman trying to collect benefits while being pursued by niqab-wearing immigrants pushing strollers.

Sweden clearly has an economy and society shifted far further in the direction of a social welfare state than the United States, but it is remarkable to see far-right politicians there, as with the Trump-Republican Party in the United States, put the blame for economic problems on immigrants (though, to be fair, the Trump administration also points the finger at foreigners in general for not playing fair in the world of trade).

But it turns out there are plenty of reasons for why the anti-immigrant movement in Sweden has much in common with what’s going on in other countries.  Sweden Democrats have extensive connections with other far-right European governments, such as Viktor Orban’s authoritarian regime in Hungary.  They’ve also received extensive behind-the-scenes support from Russia; there is ample evidence pointing to a concerted effort by that country to promote right-wing Swedish news sites, which the article details extensively.  Chillingly, the Times also documents an incident in which Russians claiming to be journalists attempted to pay immigrants in Stockholm to start a riot so that they could film it; this occurred two days after Donald Trump’s false allegations last year about immigrant-spawned violence in Sweden.  It is also beyond disturbing that the Sweden Democrats look to the presidency of Donald Trump, and find solace and inspiration in his misrule.

Sweden has obvious challenges to its culture and to its social welfare state due to the number of immigrants it’s generously let into the country; as an Iranian immigrant notes, “the sheer number of refugees had overwhelmed the government’s efforts to integrate them,” allowing the Sweden Democrats to gain a large hold on power when other parties “didn’t have any answers.”  But this article raises provocative questions about the nature of the global anti-immigrant and far-right populist movement, including the tension between whether it’s happening organically and democratically based on unavoidable cultural and economic forces, or is quite consciously being made to happen, both by opportunistic politicians and by authoritarian countries like Russia that seek to use the movement to advance their own goals.

It has also gotten me back to wondering whether these far-right movements honestly see immigrants as hurting the economy, or whether this is a cover for basic racism and cultural antipathy.  I also wonder about the moral foundations and even sanity of previously ethnically homogenous countries like Sweden and Norway in which significant percentages of the population are inspired not simply to object to, but actively hate and despise, newer arrivals to their country.

Beyond this, it seems clear that immigrants are being scapegoated for economic problems that are due to the dark turns of capitalism over the past several decades: as I’ve read elsewhere, the far-right groups in Sweden started popping up in the 1970’s, around the same time that major industries in Sweden began pushing back against the extent of the social welfare state.  To what degree is the anti-immigrant far-right a stalking horse for corporate interests that want to escape blame for the economic changes they’ve managed to implement so far, and which may underlie the actual challenges to the Swedish welfare state?  I also wonder about the true goals of the far-right politicians themselves.  If they’ve identified the wrong sources of Sweden’s, or Denmark’s, or Germany’s troubles, and they have no real plan for fixing them, what’s the point of being in politics?  Is it ultimately about a will to power, about a basic authoritarian desire?

What Happens in Hong Kong Matters to Supporters of Democracy Everywhere

To observe the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong is to feel a mixture of admiration and dread: short of standing down, the city seems to have no chance of escaping a brutal Chinese crackdown, except by somehow bringing to bear a combination of moral and political force and arriving at a compromise currently difficult to imagine.  But although it’s easy to feel helpless as well, Americans must bear witness to the bravery and spirit of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Hong Kong residents who have chosen to participate.  

These protests may have their origins particular to Hong Kong politics, but they’re happening in the context of a global movement towards authoritarianism and illiberalism that makes them both inspiring and a warning sign.  China is deploying the tools of authoritarianism to control the narrative, poisoning media with state-sponsored propaganda in order to influence the mainland Chinese population as well as members of the Chinese diaspora; against this, it’s even more important that we see events for what they are. That the Hong Kong protestors fight against such overwhelming odds is remarkable; that it is taken as a matter of course that China is a totalitarian state that can do what it wants with its Hong Kong territory is a grotesquerie. And the intersection of this conflict with the global economy, given Hong Kong’s outsized role in finance and trade, is also worth remarking, as if the world were being forced to choose between democracy or capitalism.

The Chinese government is already using the idea of American support of the protests to try to discredit them.  The joke, of course, is that we currently have the least democratic president in our history.  Donald Trump, an admirer and avowed friend of authoritarians, doubtless looks out on the protestors and sees a people to whom he can’t begin to relate, given the gulf of democratic intentions and skin color.  It’s notable that he has had plenty of harsh words about China’s trade policies, but only mumble-jumble to say about the potential of a deadly clampdown on unarmed civilians.

Regardless, it seems both deeply said and incredible to me that the United States would not make it clear that any escalation of violence against the protestors would have repercussions for the entirety of the U.S.-China relationship.  I have zero confidence that the Trump administration will do the right thing here.

If the United States were to assume its proper role as an advocate for democracy, the inability of Chinese citizens to elect their leaders would offend us far more than whether they’re a currency manipulator, and whether a Hong Kong protestor could get a fair trial would matter as much as whether China was stealing American trade secrets.  This, above all, is the context to keep in mind when viewing how this story unfolds: China lacks the most basic legitimacy or moral standing when it denies protestor calls for democracy and due process. These are not outrageous demands in any shape or form; they are basic human rights. What we are watching may be deeply familiar, but we can’t let that obscure the shocking obscenity of telling people they can have no say in their own affairs. That simply makes no sense, and should never be treated as if it does.

Shirking War on White Nationalist Terror is an Impeachable Offense

We are now past the point at which congressional Democrats, and the party more generally, must  place opposition to white nationalism, in both its political and its violent modes, as one of the party’s highest stated priorities.  Two mutually reinforcing factors demand this: the escalation of white supremacist violence as the leading form of domestic terrorism, and the synergy between this violence and the Trump administration’s white nationalist rhetoric and policies.  On the second point: not only is it irrefutable that the president’s language is giving aid and comfort to far-right extremists, and inciting violent acts, but we have learned in recent days that the Trump administration has opposed dedicating resources to fighting domestic terrorism, and sought to hide from both Congress and the public the evidence of this escalating threat.  

Last week, CNN reported that “White House officials rebuffed efforts by their colleagues at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a year to make combating domestic terror threats, such as those from white supremacists, a greater priority.”  This effort by DHS occurred during the construction of the National Counterterrorism Strategy, which was issued in the fall of 2018.  One paragraph addressing domestic terrorism was eventually added; according to CNN, this bare mention is 

all the more stark given that FBI Director Christopher Wray's July testimony that there have been almost as many domestic terror arrests in the first three quarters of the fiscal year  about 100 – as there have been arrests connected to international terror.  Wray noted that the majority of the domestic terrorism cases were motivated by some version of white supremacist violence.

A Trump administration official told CNN that they are “surging resources” to domestic terrorism matters, but that “they’re behind the curve because of a lack of support from the White House.”  This source also pointed to Trump as being a major factor in why the White House resisted highlighting domestic terrorism; the source indicated that Donald Trump’s “reluctance to criticize white supremacists was part of ‘an overlay’ of all these discussions, and added, “"You know it will trigger the boss.”

In other words, setting the full law enforcement power of the United States government against terrorists who seek to kill Americans for the color of their skin or country of origin, and whose end goal is the overthrow of American democracy, is something that makes the president uncomfortable, or perhaps even angry.  Now, these are the words of a single, anonymous source – but the larger story is more broadly sourced, and does any observer of this president really doubt at this point that investigating white nationalists might upset him?

Almost inconceivably, though, the story gets even worse, with new facts lending a yet more ominous cast to the behavior documented in CNN’s report.  According to Raw Story:

The Trump administration has known since at least April that alleged white supremacists were responsible for every single act of race-based domestic terrorism in the U.S. in 2018, yet not only took no action to combat the growing right wing violent extremism, but actually substantially reduced or even eliminated funding and programs that combat white supremacist extremism, violence, and terrorism – and then blocked the data from reaching the hands of Congress.

According to the blocked report, there were 32 domestic terrorist incidents in 2018.  White supremacists were behind them all.  

The Raw Story piece notes that Congress should investigate why the Trump administration blocked this date from Congress, to which we can only say: yes, and a hell of a lot more.  There is now sufficient evidence in the public record to credibly suggest that the Trump administration is not only actively downplaying the threat of white nationalist violence, but actively resisting taking action against it.  If true, these are impeachable offenses.  The president took an oath of office to protect the U.S. against enemies foreign and domestic; a reluctance to defend us against the latter has emerged, and must be explored further. 

Of course, the rise of white nationalist terrorism is only one half of the story, the other half being a president who has placed appeals to white nationalism at the dead center of his presidency and re-election effort.  There really is no separating these two sides of what is actually a unified narrative: a growing terrorist movement that the White House is reluctant to take action against, and a president who promotes ideas that align with those of this violent movement, and whose words incite their violence.

The fusion of these two stories needs to be treated as the crisis it is by Democrats nationwide.  The U.S. must be defended against these right-wing militants, and against a president willing to suppress the overwhelming evidence of the threat they pose.  This is no time for caution or feeling out the political winds.  As this New York Times piece out today reminds us, when a Homeland Security Department report came out in 2009 warning of “race-driven extremism,” the Republican Party went absolutely apeshit over it:

[W]hen the report was made public, it ignited a storm of protest, mostly from the right.  Mike Pompeo, then a Republican congressman from Kansas and now secretary of state, said focusing on domestic terrorism was a “dangerous” undertaking born of political correctness that denied “the threat that radical Islamic terrorism poses [. . .] The multipronged Republican backlash included criticism of the term “right-wing extremism,” and a near disavowal of the existence of domestic terrorism. Republican politicians and pundits echoed Mr. Pompeo’s assertion that the idea of domestic terrorism was a feint, born of political correctness, meant to distract from foreign terrorism.

The story reminds us of how the Obama White House rescinded this threat assessment weeks later, partly out of “concern that highlighting the issue would only fuel white supremacist conspiracy theories or give unwarranted publicity to fringe figures, according to six former administration officials.”  But the right-wing backlash was clearly decisive in the administration’s lamentable decision to essentially allow itself to be cowed into downplaying a threat, which, ten years on, has only grown, and is now amplified by our most despicable of presidents.  

The Times report notes the political challenges to fighting right-wing extremism, citing the Obama administration’s backing down on the threat assessment and civil liberty concerns on the left in targeting domestic group, yet this history pales in comparison to the preponderance of facts and overwhelming current reality: the GOP has stuck up for right-wing extremists for a decade and more now, and is currently led by a president for whom these extremists are fine people.  The idea that there is some sort of equivalence between the ACLU raising objections on the left and the president and leading members of the Republican establishment sticking up for white supremacists on the right is to manufacture a false equivalence out of the flimsiest of materials.

The fight against right-wing terror poses a political conundrum only for those unconcerned about defeating it.  For those who look to defend the United States against political violence, there is no course forward but to commit fully do defeating violent extremists and their elected enablers.

Why We Write: Betting on Persuasion in the Age of Trump

One of those broad-consensus, everyone-knows-it truisms of the Trump era is that the insults and attacks this president perpetrates upon our country are so ceaseless and numerous that we are collectively benumbed and overwhelmed, barely able to react to one as the next comes hurtling at us through the media.  Ancillary to this consensus is a critical debate about how the media can best serve the public in its coverage of Donald Trump — should it highlight every single offense, even at the risk of overwhelming its audience and its own reporting resources, or go in the opposite direction, giving less play to his most provocative maneuvers and more to the larger context of the great political forces and trends of our time?

But an important question has been obscured by the mixed reality and perception of Trump’s ability to overwhelm our capacity to process things, and by the related debate over how the media might best cover him: what’s actually the point in writing about Trump?  I don’t say this to be flippant or provocative, or to sound despairing.  I get the overall reason: to inform the public, as all news is ostensibly meant to do.  I am thinking here more specifically of opinion and analysis of the Trump administration.  After all, there is no doubt that the public is deeply polarized for and against Donald Trump.  If you are writing a piece that argues for the nefariousness of this presidency, you will likely not have the satisfaction of convincing very many people to your side, as those people probably won’t read you anyway, seeing as our political polarization extends to choices of personal media diet and the tendency to place ourselves in self-reinforcing opinion bubbles.

Another way of posing this question is, What is there left to say?  What more do we need to write about this vile man and his lickspittles in the GOP?  Isn’t it true that the people who are already convinced to oppose him can be convinced no further, and that those who support him obviously won’t be persuaded to change their minds at this late date?  For the anti-Trump reading public, the question is complementary: What is there left to know?  Why torture ourselves with yet more analysis of what Trump does and why he does it?

I think there are several persuasive responses to this question of why an exhausted populace should still engage with critiques of Trump and his enablers, and why the analyses are still worth writing.  The first is that, despite the deliberate strategies of chaos and seeking to overwhelm media coverage through sheer volume of offense and distraction, an overall picture has formed over the last couple years that was not at all readily apparent at the time of the president’s election.  I think relatively few among us believed that Donald Trump would, three years in, be presiding unabashedly over a white supremacist presidency, with the more or less complete acquiescence of his entire political party.  While this possibility was latent in his election, the reality that has emerged urgently requires description, and to be made known to as many Americans as possible.  And the complicity of the GOP I just noted is another major subject that citizens are well-served to learn about, as this essential fact makes clear that we face not just a Donald Trump problem, but a Republican Party problem.  In turn, Trump and the GOP together pose not simply a white nationalist threat, but an authoritarian challenge to American democracy, built on the president’s demagoguery and the GOP’s willingness to break the structures of our democracy in favor of white rule.

But though these are vital understandings for anyone who wishes to be an informed citizen, being an informed citizen is only the prelude to what all news and critiques of the Trump administration should push toward: citizens taking action to change this country for the better.  And we cannot make the changes we need unless we’re aware of the full challenges we face.  Just as we’re not going to push past the horror of the Trump administration without fully reckoning with the GOP’s authoritarian inclinations, we also need to engage in a full public airing of the menace of white nationalism and white supremacism with an eye to discrediting and destroying these noxious ideologies.

Indeed, sometimes I half-jokingly (and sometimes, not-so-jokingly) wonder if I should end every piece with a tagline along the lines of “Organize. Vote.  Mobilize.  Call Your Congressperson.  Call Your Senator.” as a reminder that political action needs to be the end goal - not simply as a means to knock the GOP out of office, but as a way to affirmatively hash out, collectively, what type of country we want to live in, and work to make it a reality.  One obvious point that gets short shrift is that Americans of good conscience are desperate for hope, desperate to do something to make a difference.  Doing one’s duty by trying to understand our political crisis can be deeply demoralizing and even debilitating, and there is really no better remedy than taking informed democratic action alongside our fellow Americans to improve matters.

Somewhat unexpectedly, what got me thinking the thoughts above was an essay by Rhonda Garelick, titled Surrogate Angels of Death, in which she performs a close reading of the now-infamous photograph of Donald and Melania Trump posing with Paul Anchondo, the two-month-old infant whose parents were killed by the white nationalist terrorist in El Paso last weekend.  Because the reaction of so many who have seen this photo is a combination of visceral revulsion and disorientation, Garelick’s piece is remarkable for holding its gaze on this grim tableau for longer than most of us have been willing to bear.

The photo falls into the long line of Trumpian provocations and outrages that I started off talking about, that steady stream said to benumb us with its rapidly alternating slide show of depravity and cruelty. Garelick understands that, given this oversaturated environment, she can best communicate what she wants to by careful attention to perspective.  And so she begins the piece by asking us to put ourselves in the place of the baby’s dead mother:

Imagine this: A shooter has entered a public place, where you are walking with your family. You have but a minute to realize you can save your 2-month-old by using your own body to shield him from the bullets raining down around you.  Mere days later, your baby, the youngest survivor of the El Paso massacre, will appear on television with the very man who inspired the terrorist who killed both you and your husband.  A photograph is taken, for posterity.

Not only does Garelick introduce context, but she does so through an act of moral imagination, asking us to see through the eyes of a dead woman.  She allows this overt framing drop away as the piece continues, but this initial invitation to see matters from an unexpected perspective counter-intuitively provides grounding in the face of the moral disgrace she proceeds to describe: the vapidity of the Trumps, the least family-oriented couple to occupy the White House in recent memory, taking the place of Paul’s parents; the appalling thumbs us; the thousand-watt smiles; the fatal link between Trump’s rhetoric and the shooter’s decision to kill.  Additionally, Garelick sees a connection to the separation of children from parents along the border; noting that “the abuse and kidnapping of children of color are recurrent themes in this administration,” she sees the photo as a symbolic kidnapping of baby Paul, that stands in for the larger crisis upon us:

All of these ghastly truths make themselves felt in this single photo of the vacuous and smug Trumps masquerading as kindly hospital visitors, seeking to comfort the El Paso survivors. Posing for this photograph, the Trumps remove any last doubt about their dead-eyed cruelty and transactional view of life [. . .]

Injured, confused, squirming away from Melania’s brittle embrace, and straining toward what’s left of his family, Baby Paul now stands in for all the children — indeed, all human beings — who, like him, have been harmed and are being held against their will by a white supremacist president.  

What broke through to me — what made reading this piece “worth it,” despite the fact that I have no position left to be changed vis-a-vis Donald Trump, nor could be persuaded to despise him more than I already do, nor more inspired to fight to put things right — is that Garelick helped me see that at the bottom of so much of our political crisis is a crisis of our shared humanity.  The Trumps, with their “dead-eyed cruelty and transactional view of life,” have little in common with the vast majority of Americans.  The president is a broken man, rich in money but impoverished in those things that most of us know are what count in life: kindness, empathy, fellow feeling, a moral compass.  And in turn, the white nationalism on which this administration centers is similarly impoverished, rooted in a denial of our common humanity for the sake of a self-defeating belief that the way to make America great is to deny the basic equality of most Americans.

Gorelick’s article has helped me fight back my own doubts about the power of persuasion in these polarized times.  At the bottom of this administration’s sins are violations of our common humanity so basic that only the most unreconstructed white supremacist should be immune to arguments against white nationalism.  To use a baby as a prop for a hospital photo shoot — a baby already discharged from the hospital, yet brought back to please a president, an infant who had bones broken as his parents sought to save his life with their own falling bodies — when you, as president, have done more than any other single human being to incite acts of violence such as the one that left Paul an orphan?  Words are necessary to mark this moment, but they also begin to fail before the spiritual emptiness they seek to describe. Trump is betting that millions of Americans are as rotten at the core as he is; hope lies in still seeking to persuade these Americans that they are better than this. Against this president’s wholesale manipulation of the media and the cynical effort to divide Americans against each other, we retain this advantage: a belief in our common humanity that cuts through serious but relatively shallower political divisions, and an ability to build solidarity by seeing through the eyes of others.

Media Narrative of Americans Helpless In Face of Gun Violence Shields GOP From Complicity in Reign of Mayhem

Threaded throughout news coverage of the twin massacres of this past weekend have been references to how the shootings have left Americans feeling “despair and helplessness,” as well as “bewildered” and “numb” in the face of such violence.  These are certainly some of the emotions being felt, but it is notable that foregrounding such passive feelings seriously downplays reactions like anger and hatred toward the killers that are also surely coursing through the body politic.  It is also critical for us to realize that the idea of a whole country traumatized and defenseless is very much a part of the cycle perpetuating mass killings generally, whether politically motivated or otherwise.  And in the case of the subset of specifically white nationalist perpetrators, such a public reaction, or the media’s characterization of it as such, validates the use of terrorism as a way of destabilizing our liberal, multi-racial democracy that they ultimately seek to destroy.  When reporting overemphasizes the impact violence has had on our society, when it suggests that Americans have been reduced to an infantile or depressive state, it is an unintended boon to the killers.

In the wake of mass shootings generally, my sense is that this journalistic overemphasis on feelings of national trauma, and underemphasis on the many millions of people for whom each killing feeds a sense of righteous fury and determination to end the violence, is tightly connected with the news media’s inclination to characterize the government’s failure to act meaningfully on gun violence as a bipartisan issue.  But the truth is that it is the Republican Party that, as a matter of ideology and keeping open major spigots of campaign funding, has been dead set against any meaningful gun control measures for a generation and more.  And while the Democratic Party has much to answer for in having deprioritized such measures for far too long, at this point there’s no ambiguity as to which party is backing gun control and which still opposes it tooth and nail.    

Once reporting on gun violence begins taking note not simply of people’s “helplessness,” but of their anger, then there is a logical need to start talking about the targets of the anger, and what the anger has motivated them to do (as opposed to reporting on “helplessness,” which by definition does not move into political action).  And any discussion of anger will at a minimum open a discussion of the blame rightly directed at the GOP for not only standing in the way of even the most minimal gun legislation, but also working in the opposite direction, to help expand the cult of gun ownership and, inevitably, gun violence.  Overly dedicated to providing “balance” in news coverage, the media has deep incentives to play up and even conjure out of whole cloth an idea of American helplessness, as a way of avoiding the unpalatable truth that where guns are concerned, one side of the political aisle is deeply in the wrong.

As damaging as this insistence on a nation benumbed and immobilized is when reporting on gun violence and mass shootings generally, this tendency becomes absolutely toxic when it’s applied to white nationalist terrorist shootings.  Indeed, the intersection of Donald Trump’s white nationalist mindset and political agenda with an acceleration of white supremacist violence across the country presents an enormous challenge to a news media dedicated to a “both sides do it” form of political journalism.  “Enormous challenge” actually understates things; I’d say that this president has essentially blown up the media’s ability to credibly maintain this unhelpful balancing act, certainly on gun issues and white supremacy.  As many have been and are beginning to argue — including leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination — the president is attacking immigrants and minorities with the same language as white nationalist terrorists.  He is inciting violence against these groups, violence that is in fact occurring.  Whether or not individual acts can be tied to direct motivation by Donald Trump is beside the point; he is now the single greatest contributor to an ideology of hatred and dehumanization for which violence is the inevitable conclusion.  And to remove any doubt that such white nationalism is central to his politics, the Trump 2020 campaign has made it clear that it will be centered on fomenting hatred of immigrants and minorities.  

Despite these plain facts — in fact, because of them — leading news organizations and opinion writers are out with editorials this week calling on the president to moderate his language, to repudiate white nationalists, to show moral leadership.  Such calls are nonsensical.  Even if we offer up the most immense benefit of the doubt, and concede that Trump’s words and actions may not have already incited particular acts of violence, and merely acknowledge that they clearly might, then there is no point in calling on him to change his ways; this incitement alone makes him unfit to be president. More insidiously, they suggest that the president can be part of the solution to this crisis, when in fact he is a primary cause.

Beyond this, such “calls upon the president” that suggest Donald Trump might change his rhetoric skip over an even more damning fact: that not just the president’s language, but his very actions and stated legislative goals, implement a white supremacist worldview.  From his lie that millions of undocumented immigrants cast votes for Hillary Clinton, necessitating draconian voting restrictions that would disproportionately affect minority voters, to the horrors inflicted on immigrants crossing the southern border, to his pushing for changes to the census that would undercount minorities, the president has indicated that if you’re not white, you’re not a full citizen, and really not fully human, to boot.  

Having made the argument since day one of this presidency that Donald Trump deserves to be removed from office at the earliest opportunity, I feel in a better position than most to observe that our greatest political problem — apart from an aspiring authoritarian president and a Republican Party comfortable with disassembling American democracy in favor of a plutocratic, apartheid-lite state — is that we are collectively having difficulty comprehending the larger picture of what is happening: namely, the general assault on American democracy by the president and the Republican Party.  This is why it’s so important to be aware of the biases and logical fallacies in reporting on this presidency that distort our collective ability to fashion an effective and appropriate response to what it is not an overstatement to call a crisis of American democracy.

For many reasons, coverage of gun violence brings multiple dysfunctional threads of our national story together.  The shock of escalating white nationalist terrorism has been dangerously obscured by how it appears as simply one small portion of the larger crisis of gun violence, allowing the threat to grow without the public taking adequate notice; yet because this terrorism largely involves gun violence, media coverage has tended to lump it into the same “issue without a solution” category.  A sharper look at the accelerants to gun violence generally, such as the GOP’s lockstep opposition to the most basic regulations, leads inexorably to the connections between the GOP’s ability to defy the will of the majority via gerrymandering and voter suppression, and our inability to pass laws that have huge majority support, such as background checks.  Such an understanding leads in turn to the fact that the GOP has ensured that a growing terrorist threat is well-armed and well-versed in an established, politically-enabled culture of mass shootings. 

In the case of the white nationalist agenda propagated by the White House, it’s supremely dangerous to excuse the inexcusable, or to believe that the president will change his ways.  If we could somehow separate out the violence that this presidency is enabling, such an agenda would still be unacceptable.  It’s un-American to say you’re not a fully citizen if you’re black, or were born in another country. It’s un-American to put kids in cages, and to house immigrants in unhealthy and demeaning conditions.  It’s un-American to encourage your supporters to revile opposition politicians because of the color of their skin or country of origin.  It’s un-American to give comfort and support to the white supremacists, the neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan. 

Yet, as bad as these outcomes are, the deadliest point can’t be stressed enough: violence is the logical outcome when the highest power in the land employs rhetoric and enacts policies indistinguishable from the wish list of avowed white nationalists.  And the propagation of violence by the White House is unforgivable.  There is no bargaining with such a power, there is no finding a middle ground or compromise.  Violence is the death of democracy, and our single greatest aim must be to ensure that the violence embraced and unleashed upon our country delegitimizes this president’s ability to continue in office.  Such a president, and the party that supports him, must not only be defeated, but utterly discredited.  America needs a real conservative party; it doesn’t need, or deserve, a white supremacist one.

Among other things, what this all should make clear is that the media is not going to save us from this president and this political crisis.  No matter where the facts seem to lead, there is apparently an overwhelming bias, at least for the time being, against making the connections that are staring us in the face.  In fact, we can see how the worse the president and the GOP get, the more powerful certain tendencies in the media will be to pretend that it isn’t so; to choose cognitive dissonance (like the Twitter-notorious Trump Urges Unity Versus Racism headline from The New York Times a day or two ago) over accurate framing and contextualization that would place major media institutions squarely on one side of our great political rupture.  There is no way forward other than to fully acknowledge the depths of our danger, and to organize and mobilize the greatest movement for democracy and justice this country has ever seen.

A President and Party Unwilling to Defend U.S. Against White Nationalist Terrorism Need to Be Turned Out of Office

The escalating tempo of mass shootings, both related to white nationalists and not, constitutes a mortal indictment of both the Republican Party and President Trump.  To consistently oppose stricter, meaningful gun regulations based on a theory of the Second Amendment that was literally invented out of whole cloth in the recent past, while Americans are gunned down by the thousands, at this point signifies that the GOP has given up on the most basic ideas of governance: that legislators should advance the health and safety of their constituents, and address violence that subverts a free and open society that at its most basic requires our ability to go about our daily business without undue fear of being slaughtered.

Beyond this, increasing right-wing violence is contiguous with the anti-minority, anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies that have taken hold of much of the political right in the United States.  As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo remind us:

 We don’t make ourselves safer by collectively agreeing to delude ourselves about what is happening. These far-right, white supremacist massacres constitute the violent, militarized version of an ideology we can hear every night on Fox News and other right wing media outlets. Indeed, we can hear it routinely, in some of its most intense and inflammatory versions, from the President of the United States.

The basic terms are familiar: immigrants (focused on Muslims and Mexicans and others from Latin America) are invading our country and replacing white Americans through their high birth rates. They bring an alien culture, crime, violence, etc. Their invasion is being abetted by elites (often Jews) who are themselves betraying America. The tide can only be turned by individual, radical, violent action. The rubric they use is ‘The Great Replacement’, though the concept is customized for use against Muslims or immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries in different regions and contexts.

Indeed, it is specifically President Trump’s cultivation of an atmosphere of hatred and dehumanization towards those he has identified as the country’s enemies, an atmosphere that activates and enables these killers, that should most absorb our collective fury and desire for a change to this evil and anti-democratic dynamic.  In just the past few weeks, the president has made racist attacks against minority members of Congress; stood by while his supporters rabidly chanted to send one of those members back to her country of origin; ridiculed a minority congressman after his home was robbed; and denigrated an American city with a large African-American population as not fit for human occupation.  He has made clear that he intends to center his 2020 re-election effort on overt appeals to white supremacist sentiment.  And beyond this, he has denied the prevalence of white nationalist terrorism, as he has done consistently throughout his term in office.

Donald Trump did not invent white supremacy, and he alone is not responsible for the escalation of its violent manifestations over the past decade.  But he is the single greatest enabler of it, and arguably the lynchpin to what is beginning to appear to be a self-perpetuating torrent of violence by right-wing extremists.  At The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan states the case as plainly as it can be put: “The president may not be pulling the trigger or planting the bomb, but he is enabling much of the hatred behind those acts. He is giving aid and comfort to angry white men by offering them clear targets — and then failing to fully denounce their violence.” And as Hasan also notes, just last week, officials at the Washington National Cathedral concisely captured the president’s role in this wave of white supremacist violence:

These words are more than a “dog-whistle.” When such violent dehumanizing words come from the President of the United States, they are a clarion call, and give cover, to white supremacists who consider people of color a sub-human “infestation” in America. They serve as a call to action from those people to keep America great by ridding it of such infestation. Violent words lead to violent actions.

It does not matter whether or not the president intends to incite violence by his words, or simply to incite hatred that propels his base to the polls.  White supremacism and white nationalism are not ideas that can be easily kept hemmed into the realm of words and policies.  They are rooted in ideas of racial inferiority and hatred, and of perpetual threat by anyone who isn’t white; violence is not some unfortunate byproduct, but a logical consequence of this dehumanization on non-whites.

I can’t do better than to quote never-Trumper Jennifer Rubin at this point on the inevitable conclusion to the facts that confront us:

For decades now, Republicans have insisted mass murders with semiautomatic weapons are not reflective of a gun problem. I can no longer comprehend how such a ludicrous assertion is remotely acceptable. But in one sense they are right: It’s not merely Republicans’ indulgence of the National Rifle Association that puts Americans’ lives in jeopardy; it is the support and enabling of a president that inspires white nationalist terrorists — and even denies white nationalism is a problem.

In sum, we are awash in hate crimes and white nationalist-inspired mass murders. We have a president whose words inspire and bolster perpetrators of these heinous acts. That makes Trump not only a moral abomination, which no policy outcome can offset, but a threat to national security. Those encouraged by his words in recent years kill more Americans than Islamist terrorists. If that is not justification for bipartisan repudiation of this president and removal from office at the earliest possible moment I don’t know what is. Those who countenance and support this president for his white-grievance mongering are not merely “deplorable” but dangerous.

This moment requires an all-out governmental mobilization against white nationalists, but this will not happen so long as Donald Trump remains president, because, as Oliver Willis points out, he can’t condemn what he agrees with.  I understand the default impulse for Democrats to “call on” the president to repudiate white nationalism, but at this stage, we know enough to know that such efforts are pointless.  Far better to tell the truth: that the president is complicit in these acts of violence, and that there is no choice but to work to remove him and the party that enables him from office.  On this front, it is promising that various Democratic presidential candidates, including Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and Beto O’Rourke, have not hesitated to tie the Donald Trump to the El Paso massacre. The president and the GOP are beyond redemption at this point; there is no use begging those who sympathize with or endorse white nationalism to do the right thing.  The sooner we understand that neither the president nor the Republican Party will abandon their core principles, the better. The way forward is to defeat the Republican Party politically, by never allowing them to escape the stain of their bad acts and philosophies, and by offering an alternative way forward: through a vision that holds all life as precious, that identifies white supremacism as the horror show that it is, that prioritizes dismantling the social and political networks that promote radicalization of white nationalist and other right-wing terrorists, and that idealistically and pragmatically makes the case that there are no litmus tests — whether racial, religious, or otherwise — for who counts as a real American, or as a fellow human being who deserves our respect and compassion.

GOP Desperate to Put Lipstick on Trump's Racist Porker of a 2020 Campaign Strategy

This weekend’s analysis by The Washington Post of the Trump re-election campaign’s decision to make explicitly racist appeals to his base offers a wealth of insight into the GOP’s rationalization of his full-on white nationalist strategy for 2020 — a strategy that will inevitably bear heavily on the electoral fortunes of the party as a whole. The gist of the article is that the Trump campaign, having looked at the polls measuring the public reaction to the president’s racist attacks on four Democratic representatives of color more than a week ago, has decided that more of the same is the recipe for re-election.  However, to defend against accusations of overt racism, the Post notes how some Republicans have asserted that his “attacks were based in ideology rather than race,” and goes on to state:

But Trump’s advisers had concluded after the previous tweets that the overall message sent by such attacks is good for the president among his political base — resonating strongly with the white working-class voters he needs to win reelection in 2020.

This has prompted them to find ways to fuse Trump’s nativist rhetoric with a love-it-or-leave-it appeal to patriotism ahead of the 2020 election, while seeking to avoid the overtly racist language the president used in his tweets about the four congresswomen.

I don’t see any way to understand the Trump campaign’s preferred strategy as anything but plausibly deniable racism.  If the president concentrates his attacks on minority and immigrant lawmakers, and then Republicans say that it’s only about their “ideology,” only the most naive voters (and reporters) would not see this for what it is: claiming that disagreement on policy is meant to provide cover for a racist appeal to white voters. And the clincher is this: since the president has already made clear that everything is for him about race, there is no reason for any American to credit all-too-transparent efforts to re-brand his racism as something more palatable.

Again and again throughout the article, the claims by GOP politicians and strategists that the president is not doing what he clearly is — running for re-election based on appeals to racism and white supremacism — are illogical or even outright laughable.  It notes that “Republican officials say Trump is harnessing the anger of those who continue to feel left behind despite the strong economy, and steering their fury toward members of Congress he has accused of bad-mouthing the country and embracing socialist policies.”  This explanation reveals far more than those GOP officials realize: they admit that the wonderful Trump economy is anything but wonderful, and correctly identify the president’s strategy of distracting his base from his economic failures by supercharging their racial resentments against groups who have no responsibility for their economic malaise.  Their explanation also oddly leaves out those Trump supporters who are doing well in the economy and who nonetheless are fired up by Trump’s incitements to open racism. 

Equally feeble are the efforts by Trump campaign and other Republican officials to claim that Trump supporters are “too quickly branded as bigots,” and that it’s the Democrats who are trying to “create conditions where if you are a certain gender or a certain race all criticism is considered racist or sexist,” as noted by Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh.  And Bryan Lanza, a 2016 Trump campaign advisor, tells the Post that “Usually, when they are faced with charges of racism, Republicans hide a little bit.  And the president’s not hiding.  And I think that that’s what the Republican voters like about him.”  Of course, the reason the president is facing charges of racism is because he’s made racist statements and implemented racist policies.  Lanza may be trying to make the opposite point, but he ends up giving the game away: Trump doesn’t hide his racism, and his supporters like it.  It’s a secondary matter that they admire that Trump stands by his racist statements and always denies that they’re racist.

Yet though it may be secondary to their receptivity to racist appeals, the widespread belief among many prejudiced white voters that they are not actually racist, and that it’s insulting to call them racist, is a very real and potent psychological phenomenon.  Studies have shown that explicit condemnations and call-outs of prejudice can have the effect of making people double-down on their racism, and clearly Trump and the GOP are now happy to weaponize this phenomenon, too, into a sinister campaign (Molotov) cocktail.  The president runs a racist re-election campaign, which thrills his base; the loyalty of the base is further super-charged when the necessary condemnations of Trump’s racism and of his followers are felt by his base to be unmerited and illegitimate.  So the racist method is not without its madness, and this is why the GOP wants to have things both ways, as it has for decades now — it wants to make racist appeals that are also deniable.  Trump is all on board with the racist appeals, but whether through indiscipline or conscious determination (or a combination of the two) doesn’t really care if the racism is deniable in a traditional sense.  To Trump, a racist statement can be rendered deniable simply because he denies that he is racist.

What keeps getting lost, not just in this one Washington Post article, but across much of the reporting on the Trump presidency and the 2020 campaign, is that the idea of a “racist campaign strategy,” while inherently evil in and of itself, simply can’t be separated from the fact that the Trump presidency is every single day moving forward a white supremacist agenda in actual real life.  Indeed, the same can even be said of the racist campaign strategy, where the president’s incitements of hatred against African-Americans, Latinx citizens and immigrants, and other groups are not just words that energize his base, but have consequences for millions of Americans who are made to feel less welcome in their own country, and who are rendered less safe as the president’s words inevitably give at least tacit encouragement to those who will follow their racist inclinations with action, up to and including terrorizing violence against their fellow human beings who happen to have a different skin color.

It’s also of note that the article chronicles how Republican politicos are avidly trying to convince themselves that this openly racist re-election strategy will not alienate more voters than it gains them.  And so they point to supportive polls, and make the argument, that moderate voters will look past the racism because they oppose the Democrats’ legislative agenda.  One detects a whiff of wishful thinking in some of the comments captured in the article, but the question of whether or not open racism backfires is the proverbial million dollar one.  (In this regard, it’s worth noting that some Republicans appear to have given up hope of winning the popular vote, and see a path to an Electoral College victory via this immoral white supremacist appeal.)  But it is surely the responsibility of Democrats, both as matters of electoral and patriotic necessity, to work to ensure that the Trump-GOP racist playbook fails.  They must confront and call out this white nationalism head-on, even when the GOP tries to hide it behind claims of arguing about “ideology” rather than race. Likewise, Democrats must be sure to map out how it is in Trump’s interests to appeal to the worst parts of human nature and our shortcomings as a nation in order to hide his own failings as president.  It is not essential or anyway realistic to expect to win over the mass of Trump backers; but peeling away even a few may make the difference in this next election.

Finally, the Post notes that “Democrats are banking on the idea that even if Trump’s language excites his base, it is likely to offend a diverse coalition of voters who will turn out to defeat him,” which one hopes will be the case.  But even as they talk a good game about still winning over moderate voters, Republican awareness of the backlash they are provoking provides deep incentives for them to mess with the mechanics of the 2020 election, whether through voter suppression or tacit support for ongoing Russian efforts to tamper with election systems and inject propaganda into the U.S. mediasphere.  Another way of putting it: Trump’s morally corrupt racist appeal makes other forms of corruption necessary in order to seal the deal of an election that must be won by a minority of voters.  

Why Aren't Republicans As Incensed by White Supremacist Terrorism as They Are By Antifa Street Fights?

A proposed nonbinding resolution by Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Bill Cassidy to designate antifascist activists, also know as antifa, as “domestic terrorists” is an unsurprising but deeply worrisome escalation of the GOP’s steady embrace of white nationalism and its inevitable efforts to suppress domestic dissent.  This escalation has now extended to an effort to obscure the violence of right-wing extremists.

Portlanders like myself are more familiar with antifa than most Americans, as they have a relatively large presence in our city, pretty much in direct relation to the fact that Oregon and the Pacific Northwest are the unfortunate repository of a variety of right-wing hate groups and white-supremacist organizations.  The city has been the site of various fairly large-scale altercations between antifa and these right-wing extremists, involving both violence and injuries (including to bystanders harmed by the police response).  My personal commitment to non-violent protest means that I find myself in full opposition to antifa tactics, even as I have no quarrel with their identification of right-wing extremism as a force that must be countered and rolled back at every opportunity.  But at this point, it appears that, in Portland at least, antifa efforts are having the opposite of the effect they intend, their tactics muddying public perceptions of the clear and present danger of right-wing extremism; their actions mean that the politically delegitimizing taint of violence is not associated solely with right-wing freaks, and they create a sense of equivalence between the two sides so that right-wing extremism is not seen as sharply as the unique threat that it is.

Yet, having said this, there is simply no real comparison between right-wing extremists and the efforts of antifa.  In an era of rising far-right violence that has claimed literally hundreds of lives over the past decade, antifa activists have been responsible for exactly zero deaths.  That’s right — none at all.  And while their violence and resulting injuries should not be excused or ignored, antifa simply lacks the organizational coherence, aims, or tactics that would argue for a domestic terrorism label for the movement.  There is no antifa entity or hierarchy to be targeted; in a similar vein, its aims simply do no match the standard conceptions of terrorism. For instance, the Patriot Act indicates that “a group commits domestic terrorism by committing crimes dangerous to human life that seem meant to intimidate the public, influence government policy by coercion or affect the government’s conduct by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.”  Antifa street brawling does not meet these ideas of “mass destruction,” “assassination,” or “kidnapping.”  In a broader sense, domestic terrorism is an attack on a free and open society, by using violence to remove the sense of personal safety necessary to conduct public and private life: again, this description does not fit antifa, which directs its efforts at a specific group of far-right agitators and ideologues.

On the other hand, right-wing extremism, in its various violent manifestations, fully meets these standards for defining domestic terrorism.  The targeting of Americans for the color of their skin, for their gender, or for their religion aims to make vast swathes of the American population feel under threat, and reflect agendas that seek to fundamentally degrade the lives of literally millions of people.

Give these facts, alongside the statistics I cited above that leave no doubt that the preeminent and ongoing terror threat facing Americans today comes not from the far-left, or anarchists, or jihadists, but from far-right extremists, it might seem puzzling that the Republican Party has decided this is a fine time to direct law enforcement’s attention against a movement that identifies itself primarily by its opposition to. . . far-right extremists.

Even if there were no rising threat of white supremacist and right-wing extremism that cries out for far more massive and coordinated law enforcement and political attention than exists at present, it would still be a massive overreach and waste of resources for the government to deem antifa as domestic terrorists.  The most benign explanation for GOP interest in such a move is to play to its Fox News-addled base, for whom the network has painted antifa as a dire threat to the republic.  But I think we are well past benign explanations for the Republican Party’s actions regarding the politicization of terrorism and of protestors deemed left-wing.  A more persuasive motivation for this Senate maneuver is to attempt to associate progressives and liberals with antifa, which is much more destructive an effort if antifa can be called, with federal imprimatur, a terrorist organization.  It is also quite believable that such a “domestic terrorist” designation, based on such a loosely defined group, could be used for even more corrupt purposes; in the worst scenario, it would be a tool to suppress any sort of demonstrations against right-wing extremism, a possible misuse that’s been raised by the Anti-Defamation League in response to the proposed Senate resolution.

We also can’t look away from how the GOP has been conquered by white nationalism, a racist ideology which inevitably sanctions state violence against minorities and others, and so is contiguous with non-governmental violence against these same groups.  A guiding strategy that puts the interests of white Americans above all others is racist, and racism is always an invitation to dehumanization of and violence against those excluded as not full citizens, not to mention those who aren’t citizens at all.  And when the president of the United States feels comfortable using racist language to argue that brown-skinned U.S. representatives don’t belong in this country, and incites hatred against whole populations, many extremists will take this as tacit encouragement for their individual and collective acts of violence against these same groups.  From this perspective, then, there might be a tacit understanding that the GOP needs to downplay the expressions of violence by extremists who differ from many Republicans in degree but not in kind.  How better to blur the stakes than to demonize a group that opposes right-wing extremists?

It is also not convincing that Republicans would point to the apparent antifa assault on conservative journalist Andy Ngo in Portland last month as an example of the left-wing threat.  President Trump has now called journalists “the enemy of the people” countless times, his campaigns and rallies are well known for the mass hatred and threats directed toward the reporters who cover them, and the largest mass killing of journalists since 9/11 occurred at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland in June of last year.  It strains credulity that after remaining silent in the face of such totalitarian and inciting language from the president, the GOP is suddenly concerned with protecting the safety of our free press.  

The real story behind these shenanigans by Cruz and Cassidy is a conspicuous conservative blind spot when it comes to the far greater threat from right-wing violence, a blindness that one begins to suspect is willful when they instead choose to demonize those people explicitly dedicated to stopping white-supremacists and other far-right malefactors.  But politicians like Ted Cruz and the brain trust (such as it is) at Fox News aren’t so naive; they’re aware that they’re putting the thumb on the scales in favor of right-wing extremists by hyping an alleged public threat that, in a real two-fer, happens to be a movement opposed to the right-wing extremists they can’t bring themselves to prioritize as public enemy number one.

Historical Perspective from Atlantic Writer Lays Bare the Stakes of President’s Racist Attacks on Congresswomen

As I never tire of saying, if you aren’t reading Adam Serwer’s political dispatches at The Atlantic these days, you’re unnecessarily denying yourself essential grounding for understanding the age of Trump.  His column in the wake of the president’s “go back to your own countries” tweet minces no words in identifying the fundamental import of Trump’s words: “He was stating his ideological belief that American citizenship is fundamentally racial, that only white people can truly be citizens, and that people of color, immigrants in particular, are only conditionally American.”  Serwer continues:

This is a cornerstone of white nationalism, and one of the president’s few closely held ideological beliefs. It is a moral conviction, not a statement of fact. If these women could all trace their family line back to 1776, it would not make them more American than Trump, a descendant of German immigrants whose ancestors arrived relatively recently, because he is white and they are not.

Particularly compelling is that Serwer demonstrates how such beliefs, and their conflict with American ideals, run clear back to the founding of the U.S.; in this, he reminds us, as well we need, that Trump is hardly an anomalous figure, but rather channels some of the oldest and foulest strains of American politics, with this basic denigration of non-white citizenship reflected in a variety of Trump administration policies, from ending DACA to the reign of sadism on the southern border.  As Serwer writes:

We can see a battle over the fundamental nature of American citizenship that has been waged since the founding. Was America founded as a fundamentally white and Christian country? Or as a land of opportunity, where anyone of any background could come, thrive, and contribute? Neither faction is truly wrong, and neither is truly right, and neither has ever won anything resembling a permanent victory—and perhaps neither ever will.

Serwer is clearly on the side of America as a land of opportunity, and ends by endorsing a more inclusive strain of American nationalism, articulated by figures like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.  But that last line above about neither faction being truly right or wrong, and that it’s possible neither may win out permanently — which one might read to be despairing or cynical — actually drives home the fact that what we are living through now is a work in progress; a dialectic between long-established tensions in the American project; and that things are far from settled, both for good and for bad.

In the face of the president’s essential declaration that he intends to make the incitement of white racist hatred and white nationalism the cornerstone of his 2020 campaign, I’d argue that articles like Serwer’s are a big part of the way that we can defeat this bigotry.  I wrote last week about the urgent need to provide context for the actions of the president and the GOP, and Serwer’s piece is perhaps a textbook case for how to embody this.  Trump’s behavior is fit into the larger American story; he may be a uniquely horrid person, but what he articulates did not come out of nowhere.  In fact, understanding this history helps us get a clearer understanding of what Trump is doing now.

This also means that when Serwer says that we are experiencing something new in the country, we should sit up and take notice.  In his most recent column, addressing the North Carolina rally at which Trump supporters chanted “Send her back” in reference to Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, Serwer asserts that “America has not been here before”:

[W]e have never seen an American president make a U.S. representative, a refugee, an American citizen, a woman of color, and a religious minority an object of hate for the political masses, in a deliberate attempt to turn the country against his fellow Americans who share any of those traits. Trump is assailing the moral foundations of the multiracial democracy Americans have struggled to bring into existence since 1965, and unless Trumpism is defeated, that fragile project will fail.

[. . .] To attack Omar is to attack a symbol of the demographic change that is eroding white cultural and political hegemony, the defense of which is Trumpism’s only sincere political purpose [. . .] To defend the remarks as politically shrewd is to confess that the president is deliberately campaigning on the claim that only white people can truly, irrevocably be American.

Serwer’s most recent piece explains the stakes of this latest dark twist in our American story; and it ends with an indictment of Democratic fumbling and fecklessness in the face of this Trumpist assault that’s both chilling (for its no-holds-barred truth-telling) and necessary (because the Democrats must be roused to action if we are to avoid slipping into a white nationalist hellscape).  Among other things, he zeroes in on the increasing craziness of the party holding back from direct confrontation with Trump’s white nationalism based on the dubious premise of winning over working-class white votes, which I think is going to emerge as perhaps the central tension of Democratic strategizing and the presidential primary contest in the coming months.

Democrats Need to Be Ready for President's Inevitable Escalation of Racist Language and Goals

The Washington Post’s reporting this weekend blows a hole in any arguments that Donald Trump was displaying a strategic political genius by his racist tweets about four Democratic congresswomen last week.  The president may not get it, but panicked reactions and comments from Republican insiders interviewed for the story show that many in the GOP understand the peril in which he’s put the party.  Of course, as many have long argued, the whole GOP is compromised by a racist mindset, but it has taken Trump to catalyze the party’s de facto embrace of white nationalism.  It may be darkly pleasurable to see these politicos now panicking about Trump going too far with his displays of outright racism, but this doesn’t mean things are better than they look.

The fact remains that, faced with hate-inciting, white supremacist language, nearly every elected GOP official at the federal level chose to publicly demure on whether the president had done anything wrong.  And the unease communicated privately to Donald Trump or to Post reporters seems to have been mostly about the possible harm to everyone’s electoral chances, not over the moral repugnance of his words.  But none of this is surprising, and neither is the fact that the president is choosing to run in 2020 on a supercharged version of his 2016 campaign of racism and white resentment.

The huge wild card, then, is what the Democrats will do about it; as I’ve already discussed, the president’s white nationalism cannot be ignored, but must be confronted outright and discredited.  Some grounds for optimism is that some Democrats are fighting for just this.  Count me as on the same page as pollster Cornell Belcher, who told The New York Times that, “Just as much time and resources as the nominee spends on targeting and messaging around health care and wages and climate change, they should spend an equal amount of resources around an alternative racial vision for the country.  This isn’t a goddamn distraction.”  It’s also hard to disagree with Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of Center for Popular Democracy, who told the Times, “You have to be able to speak powerfully about our willingness to belong together.  Don’t just condemn the racism and the language but use it as an opportunity to argue for a vision of the country in which we can all be included.”

What to articulate as a countervailing argument to white nationalism is obviously a huge topic, and I’ll return to it in future posts.  The point for now is that the last week has clarified that the Democrats absolutely cannot run from this fight.  

The Post article I noted at the start also indirectly highlights how much long-term damage the president is willing to inflict on the Republican Party for the sake of his own short-term prospects.  There’s not a GOP politician alive who’s always know that you might be able to rev up the vote with full-on expressions of white supremacism — but they also largely knew that this would ultimately prove a losing strategy, making overt what was best left to dog-whistle politics, and running the risk of energizing an anti-racist opposition.  They are now about to learn whether their cynical caution was warranted.  Again, though, there is good reason to believe that, despite the GOP complicity in Trump’s rule, and the widespread Republican embrace of racist laws involving gerrymandering and voter suppression, Trump may be pushing the GOP to a place it will not survive once the president is out of office.

Then there is the question of all those Trump rally attendees in North Carolina who took up the “Send her back” chant after Trump lied and incited his audience against Representative Ilhan Omar.  As canny observers are pointing out, by taking up the chant, his audience indicated that it understood the racist intent behind Trump’s original tweets and follow-up commentary.  In this, we see the very real possibility of the president unleashing hateful forces that defy any attempts to whitewash or contain them.  I can imagine Democrats running campaign ads of Trump rallies — the racist rants, the solid sea of white, the pleased president accepting his role as a tribune of racial hatred — and simply asking voters whether that’s the sort of America they want for themselves and their children.

This is a simplified and idealistic take, of course, but the way that Trump may be running up against baseline decency is also highlighted by how “Go back to where you came from” is explicitly cited by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as “an example of potentially unlawful harassment on the basis of national origin,” as noted by Adam Serwer at The Atlantic.   Beyond this, the president’s displays of racial antagonism and contempt would get him fired from many a private company.  As much as Trump might be saying what millions of white Americans are supposedly thinking, there are millions more white Americans who have worked for years in diverse environments where racial prejudice has been defused, not amplified, by quotidian contact with people of different ethnicities and countries of origin.

These observations point to a final thought: that responsibility for resolving the current crisis of a president willing to play groups of Americans against each other falls squarely on the Democrats and other opponents of the GOP.  As Donald Trump encourages his followers towards the blindness of hatred as an expression of authentic feeling, it is up to the rest of use to dissect, defuse, and dissolve these misdirected energies as much as possible, both for the sake of defeating this movement at the ballot box and for the sake of living peaceably with our fellow Americans.  

Defeating White Supremacism Is Non-Negotiable

This post by Greg Sargent makes me think that I’m not crazy when I say that Trump’s escalation into explicit racial incitement is dangerous in great part not simply in itself, but if it is met with insufficient pushback from the Democrats and others.  Sargent helped clarify something that has been staring a lot of us in the face: that this is not a matter where there can be compromise or mutual understanding.  There is no middle ground.  The president and his party are simply and catastrophically in the wrong, and to speak of it as a normal political disagreement fails the public. What we face is not simply the president saying racist things and proving himself a racist for anyone who might have doubted it; it is that the president has made clear that he will rely on the incitement of racial hatred to push for a vision of America that is rooted in white supremacism and the dehumanization of non-whites.

This is why the great danger right now is that this white supremacist language and approach to governance will somehow be normalized, through repetition and acquiescence; that what should lie outside the bounds of acceptability in a democratic society makes its way in — because an ideology based on hate and inequality can never be squared with democracy, but only destroy it. And as Sargent points out elsewhere, the president’s insistence that his remarks and tweets about the Democratic congresswomen aren’t racist is in itself a huge deal; Trump wants people to believe that racism is actually acceptable in politicians, by engaging in it while simultaneously disclaiming racist intent.  The effect is to mainstream racism.

So it is a little bit like being caught in a Black Mirror episode to read that some moderate Democrats believe that the last several days have actually been an enormous win for Donald Trump, and that “the party was playing into his hands by spending so much time condemning his remarks.”  Sargent’s response is spot on: addressing these moderate Democrats, he writes, “No matter how purple your district is, if you can’t explain to swing voters why Trump’s racist and white-nationalist displays and provocations are unacceptable in terms that they’ll understand — if this isn’t a fight you want to have — then you should ask yourself what the heck you’re doing there in the first place.”

But I think you can go a step further and say that this is a challenge, but also an opportunity, for the Democratic party as a whole.  The president has now placed not only himself, but the entirety of the acquiescent GOP, on a collision course with the past 200-plus years of slow, painful, and sometimes circuitous progress towards racial justice in this country.  Like many unscrupulous and immoral politicians before him, he has discovered that hate sells.  But there is nothing defensible about white supremacism, about inciting hatred against immigrants, against telling black Americans to go back to Africa.  This is bottom-of-the-barrel, white trash language, the language of demagogues and cowards, in service of an evil and anti-democratic vision.  We are way past claims of cultural anxiety or economic insecurity, at a point where basic empathy and perceptions of common humanity have been left behind in favor of hatred and tribalism.  

So what many perceive as Trump’s greatest weapon is also his greatest weakness; but it takes conscious and concerted effort to make sure his embrace of hate does him in.  To speak optimistically, it beggars the imagination to think that the Democratic Party might not be able to articulate a countervailing, persuasive vision of what this country really stands for.  In fact, plenty of Democrats and others have already been doing this.  And the Democrats need to grasp the opportunity of this moment, the chance to break not simply Trump but the entire GOP on the anvil of white supremacy.

As frightening as this time in our history is, we can’t lose sight of the fact that Trump and the GOP are acting out of weakness, not strength. They are embarked on a high-risk strategy that can only work if they are allowed to dissemble about their racist and anti-democratic ends, and if the majority allows itself to be cowed by the displays of hate — hate that has at its root fear, cowardice, and ignorance.

All Tweets Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal Than Others

I want to return to the president’s racist tweets against four Democratic members of Congress this past weekend, because they bring together all the foulness and challenges of addressing this unfit president in one combustible and super-saturated package.  Let’s start with the discussion of whether this is just another example of Donald Trump inciting outrage in order to distract and confound his opposition.  I’m all for keeping our eyes on the prize, and not getting sucked into every controversial or despicable pronouncement from this president, who after all has showed a canny ability to steer political coverage and discussion through his abuse of the presidential megaphone, now amplified by the dubious miracle of Twitter.  This is why I’ve argued repeatedly that, given the relative ease with which the president has been able to maintain the initiative, it’s crucial that the opposition set forth a coherent and damning explanatory framework for the president’s actions and pronouncements; this framework should hamper his ability to change the subject, instead providing a narrative into which each new offense can be seen as pieces of a united and despicable whole, and thus turn the president’s efforts against him.

The president seeks to outrage, and does so in a myriad of darkly creative ways, but it’s the reasons for what makes us feel outraged that we ought always return to.  But I’ve argued since the start of this presidency that no further evidence was needed to prove his unfitness for office; that his words and actions during the 2016 campaign disqualified him from being president.  It was clear then that he was a treasonous, anti-democratic, white supremacist authoritarian-in-waiting, and not a day has gone by since his inauguration that he didn’t re-prove the truth of this case.  Put another way: from the start, the actual reasons for the outrage he provoked were sufficient to justify implacable commitment to his removal from office.  In a sense, all other offenses he committed after his inauguration were only icing on a gay-fearing-baker’s artisanal wedding cake.

My ideal political stance, then, is one that acknowledges but doesn’t treat in isolation Trump’s various offenses.  As I said, what is required is that the basic premises of his unfitness for office be established, and each new offense entered as a piece of evidence in the tally of established broader reasons for why he should be forced from office.  But the key is this: I’m not just talking about congresspeople literally noting these offenses in preliminary articles of impeachment (although, yes, that’s part of it), but about something larger.  I’m talking about opponents of Trump putting together a public argument with which to convince as many fellow citizens as possible of the urgent need for action, with the end being removal of the president via impeachment or resignation.  Failing this, this strategy aims at ensuring the president is defeated in the 2020 election.  And beyond this, I want to be clear: the ultimate response to Trump is to organize politically, in order to win future elections and oppose his policies, be it the abuse of migrants or the ongoing offenses against our environment.

This is part of the reason I’ve sometimes included “ruthless” in my list of necessary qualities for addressing Trump and the authoritarian GOP: we must ever be aware that the point is not simply to call out presidential misdeeds, but to do so in a way that persuades fellow Americans into opposition, and that shifts some number of these Americans into political organizing, whether it’s voter registration, putting pressure on their elected officials, or working on political campaigns.  And this is most effectively done if we can point to how each individual offense is part of an identifiable and political strategy and agenda.  The president is going to keep doing what he’s done, because he thinks it works: it certainly jazzes his base, and he may be right, up to a point, about how it jars and overwhelms the opposition.

But it simply makes no sense to me to conclude that when a president self-indicts on a daily basis, his opponents cannot find a way to turn his own high-risk strategy against him.  I’ve been trying to summarize my take on such a strategy, which at its core involves describing and contextualizing the behavior of Trump and the GOP.

As I wrote a couple days ago, what is so striking about the president’s “black/brown people should go back to their home countries” tweets and remarks is that this is a clear case where the tweets are not a distraction from something worse.  After all, these remarks, and the GOP’s mass silence in their aftermath, further establish that the president and his party are agreed on a white supremacist vision for the United States.  So of course they should inspire outrage — but the real story, the thing we should be talking about and persuading our friends and neighbors of, is that we have a president and a ruling party that see white supremacism not only as a legitimate basis for organizing politics and society, but as at the center of their political agenda and strategy.  

This is also why discussions of whether or not these tweets “prove” that Donald Trump is a racist are understandable but also off the mark.  On the one hand, for the president to put forth such clearly racist sentiments will hopefully turn some number of people against the president.  But on the other, the point is not that Trump is personally racist, but that he embraces and seeks to implement a white nationalist vision of the United States.  His words might sound like the classic “racist uncle” yelling at people of color from the porch of some Gray Gardens-style manse, but coming from the president they are something else entirely.  Not only do they render him untrustworthy to execute the law of the land in a race-blind, equitable fashion, but they are of a piece with what we already know: that the GOP and Trump see their surest path to political victory through inciting the fears and hatreds of their white base, and to promote whites’ political position and status in society at the expense of everyone else.  This is to say nothing of the supercharging of daily racism and violence against non-whites in our country that the president’s endorsement of overt racism will lead to.

I think this is a case where some Democratic politicians are using the seemingly wise theory that you can’t jump at every Trumpian provocation as a way to avoid this damning conclusion in response to Trump’s “back to Africa” remarks; for to publicly indict the GOP and Trump as white supremacist in ideology is to at some level to risk all strategies that seek to win the White House by courting persuadable white voters who broke for Trump in 2016, who they fear will side with Trump if the 2020 election focuses primarily on race.

I also think that any spin on Trump’s recent tweets that stresses their intention to outrage his opposition dangerously misses or understates what is clearly a key part of their intent: to incite Trump’s backers, and to peel away some number of undecided white voters into the Trump camp.  The GOP can of course pretend that they’re actually talking about protecting the borders, or protecting the U.S. from “communists” like the congresswomen targeted by the president, but Trump keeps giving the game away: it’s about inflaming racial hatred against non-whites.  And when Trump makes explicit a white nationalist agenda that by its very nature will require suppression of non-white votes, that promotes the primordial American sin of racism, and that views non-whites as not real citizens, it’s not just another campaign strategy, one among many: it’s a full frontal assault on what this country is about, channeling the most hateful and discredited of traditions.

In such a situation, to argue that the Democrats are somehow falling into Trump’s trap by “allowing” the president to make the election about white supremacism instead of health care or the economy completely misreads the stakes and downplays the need to explicitly refute this cancerous ideology.  The president is going to incite “white grievance and anti-immigrant nativism” in 2020, as this Washington Post article notes, no matter what the Democrats do; he thinks this is what won him the 2016 election, and it’s what he believes in.  This is a moral reckoning that the opposition can’t avoid, as it goes to the heart of what sort of country we are.  But beyond this, it also goes to whether we’re actually a democracy: for a white nationalist appeal isn’t going to win the White House or Congress without anti-democratic measures to suppress and gerrymander the vote.

This doesn’t mean that Democrats should avoid talking about the economy, the environment, health care, or education; after all, these are areas in which the president is failing everyone, including his supporters.  But the best defense against his white nationalist pathology is to shine a light on it; to explicate the meaning of the president’s racist words to ensure that no informed citizen can be ignorant of their immoral content; and to contend that you can have white nationalism, or American democracy, but not both.